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Tuesday Bantering: Drew Hutchison breakout player

By Tom Dakers
Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

We've got a couple of links for you today and an interesting tweet:

A ghost running will be a lot of fun. Maybe we could have the ghost of Ty Cobb, make people afraid to tag him at second.  Less fun is Ramon Santiago out for 10 weeks.

MLB Pipeline has the Blue Jays ranked as the 10th best minor league system in baseball.

Keith Law posted his 9 picks to have a breakout season and among them (subscription required) is our Drew Hutchison. About Drew Keith wrote:

I agree that the injury to Marcus Stroman was both a big blow to the Blue Jays' playoff hopes and an even bigger loss for those of us who just love the game, but Stroman's emergence as a top-flight starter had obscured the gains made by Hutchison since his return from 2012 Tommy John surgery. In particular, Hutchison changed his release point on his slider to give it more depth and be better able to throw it effectively against left-handed hitters, but also taking a little velocity off of it, almost using it like a splitter. The pitch now spins faster, more vertically (actually less tilt), and with a longer break, all of which made it harder for hitters to hit -- boosting his swing-and-miss rates on the pitch by over 40 percent. Give him that weapon for a full season and he should shave a run off his ERA.

I'm hopeful, we are going to need him to have a breakout season. I haven't seem enough of him this spring to give an opinion on what's going on now, he has pitched 6 innings, allowing 2 hits, 2 walks with 2 strikeouts.

And John Sickels has his list of Top 175 MLB prospects up and there are 7 Blue Jays on the list, as well as 4 more on his 'just missed out list". The Jays on the list are:

7. Daniel Norris

14. Aaron Sanchez

76. Dalton Pompey

103. Jeff Hoffman

114. Max Pentecost

121. Devon Travis

171. Miguel Castro

The just missed out list includes Sean Reid-Roley, Dwight Smith, Matt Smoral and Richard Urena.

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